Square One: A Conversation with Kate Spencer Stewart
View of the artist's studio, Los Angeles, July 2025. Photography by Gillian Steiner. Courtesy of the artist and Flash Art.
Los Angeles–based artist Kate Spencer Stewart and I connected over a video call, both working from our own desks — mine was the kitchen table. Though distant from each other and from the studio, I began by asking her to describe the space where she creates her large-scale abstract paintings.
"It’s not so interesting," Stewart said, explaining that her studio is big enough for her to work on several paintings simultaneously.
Each painting, according to her, is its own independent entity — and having recently seen her exhibition “Nuit,” I understood exactly what she meant. The show presented Stewart’s vivid abstract canvases alongside framed pages from La Nuit, a portfolio of lithographs by Odilon Redon from 1886.
The pieces were displayed within the compact rooms of the Clerk’s House, Emalin’s East London gallery housed in an eighteenth-century building once occupied by night watchmen guarding a nearby cemetery from body snatchers. The atmospheric setting and Redon’s shadowy imagery harmonized beautifully with Stewart’s commanding, expressive works — almost too expansive for the rooms that contained them.
Striking and ambitious, Stewart’s paintings evoke a sense that indirect, intuitive modes of understanding the world hold significant value.
Author’s Summary
Through her large abstract works, Kate Spencer Stewart reveals how subtle, poetic engagement with the world can be as powerful as realism.